What Strategies Reinforce Memory Consolidation of Older Chinese Adults?
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| Prof. Quentin Zhen Qin | |
| Tuesday 18 March 2025 at 11:00 am - 12:00 pm (Hong Kong time, GMT +8) | |
|
Zoom (https://hkust.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_yQVD2m5lQqKCJ6Zp4tKpSQ) |
China has seen increasingly aging populations due to extended life expectancy and a rapidly declining fertility rate. Considering the urgent issues related to cognitive decline that arise with aging, this talk will focus on older Chinese adults. Sleep is vital for maintaining memory function, as it facilitates the transfer of information from temporary memory to long-term memory. Older adults, however, often experience poor sleep quality, which may hinder the process of memory consolidation. Thus, it is essential to explore strategies to enhance memory consolidation in this population through optimized training paradigms. This talk will present two behavioral studies on Mandarin-speaking older adults in China. The first study examined older adults’ novel word learning. An evening group completed a 6-block training session and immediately took the test in the evening, followed by a 12-hour interval that included nocturnal sleep before the re-test. In contrast, a morning group underwent identical training, an immediate test in the morning, and a re-test after a 12-hour wake interval. The results showed no change in word recall by either group. The second study examines whether extended learning reinforces memory consolidation in older adults. A new cohort was examined using the same experimental protocol but with an extended 10-block training. An evening group that received the extended training followed by sleep demonstrated improved word recall, whereas their morning counterpart did not. This finding indicates that memory consolidation in older adults can be strengthened with more training opportunities before sleep. The talk will discuss the mechanism underlying sleep-dependent memory consolidation in aging and conclude with strategies for optimizing learning tailored to older Chinese adults.
About the speaker
Dr. Quentin Zhen QIN is currently an Assistant Professor of Linguistics in the Division of Humanities and Associate Director of the Center for Chinese Linguistics at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He graduated from the University of Kansas, United States, with a Ph.D. in linguistics. His research focuses on how lexical tones in Chinese languages are perceptually learned and consolidated by second-language learners by adopting phonetic and psycholinguistic approaches. His interdisciplinary work aims to explain learners’ (in) ability to process non-native prosody across the lifespan. His research at UST can be found at Speech, Learning, and the Brain Lab website: https://slab-lab.github.io More>>
About the moderator
Prof. CHENG Chen, Assistant Professor, Division of Social Science. More>>
Registration
The seminar will be conducted through Zoom. Sign up here.
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